After staking Blackleg out, he took the saddle and bridle from the animal and stalked toward the ranchhouse. A light burned on the kitchen table. He saw it from a distance and resisted an impulse to enter the house from the kitchen, walking, instead, around to the front, where he found the door to the office unbarred. He threw the saddle into a corner, lighted the candle that still stood on the desk where he had placed it the night before, and stood for a long time in its glare, examining the ragged gashes on his arm. Twice during the day he had washed the wounds with water secured from the river, binding the arm with a handkerchief; but he noted with a scowl that the arm was swollen and the wound inflamed. He finally rewound the bandage, tieing the ends securely. Then he stood erect beside the desk, listening and undecided.

No sound reached his ears. The Claytons, he a.s.sured himself, must have retired.

He walked over to the sofa and sat upon it, frowning. He was hungry, having been without food since morning, and he found himself wondering if he might not find food in the kitchen. Obeying an impulse, he got up from the sofa and went to the door through which Betty had entered the night before, noting that it was still barred as he had left it that morning. He carefully removed the fastenings and swung the door open, intending to go into the kitchen. He halted on the threshold, however, for beside a table in the dining room, in the feeble glare of a light that stood at her elbow, sat Betty, reading a book.

She looked up as the door opened, betraying no surprise, smiling mildly, and speaking as she might have spoken had she been addressing a friend.

"Won't you come in?"

She placed the book down, sticking a piece of paper between the leaves to mark her place, and stood up.

"I have been waiting for you. I heard you come in. I expected you for supper, and when you didn't come I saved yours. If you will come out into the kitchen I will get it for you."

Calumet did not move. Had Betty shown the slightest dismay or perturbation at sight of him he would not have hesitated an instant in walking past her to get the food which she had said was in the kitchen.

But her easy unconcern, her cool a.s.sumption of proprietorship, aroused in him that obstinacy which the revelation of her power over him had brought into being. He did not purpose to allow her to lead him to anything.

"I don't reckon I'll grub," he said.

"Then of course you have been to Lazette," she returned. "You had dinner there."

"Look here," he said truculently; "does it make any difference to you where I've been or what I've done?"

"Perhaps it really doesn't make any difference," she answered calmly; "but of course I am interested. I don't want you to starve."

His face expressed disgust. "Holy smoke!" he said; "I reckon I ain't man enough to take care of myself!"

"I don't think that is the question. Can't we get at it in the proper spirit? You belong here; you have a right to be here. And I am here because your father wanted me to stay. I want you to feel that you are at home, and I don't want to be continually quarreling with you. Be mean and stubborn if you want to--I suppose you can't help that. But so long as conditions are as they are, let us try to make the best of them. Even if you don't like me, even if you resent my presence here, you can at least act more like a human being and less like a wild man.

Why," she continued, with a dry laugh, "just now you spoke of being a man, and this morning after you killed Lonesome you acted like a big, over-grown boy. You had your arm hurt and refused to allow me to dress it. Did you think I wanted to poison you?"

"What I thought this morning is my business," returned Calumet gruffly.

Betty's voice had been quietly conversational, but it had carried a subtle sting with its direct mockery, and Calumet felt again as he had felt the night before, like an unruly scholar being rebuked by his teacher. Last night, though, the situation had been a novel one; now the thought that she was laughing at him, taunting him, filled him with rage.

"Mebbe you'll be interested in knowin' what I think right now," he said. "It's this: you've got a bad case of swelled head. You're one of them kind of female critters which want to run things their own way.

You're--"

Her laugh interrupted him. "We won't argue that again, if you please.

If you remember, you had something to say on that subject last night, and I want you to know that I haven't the slightest desire to hear your opinion of me. Won't you sit down?" She invited again, motioning to a chair beside the table, opposite hers. "If you absolutely refuse to eat, I presume there is no help for it, though even if you had dinner in Lazette you must be hungry now, for a ride of twenty miles is a strict guarantee of appet.i.te. Please sit down. There is something I want to give you, something your father left for you. He told me to have you read it as soon as you came."

She stood motionless until Calumet left the door and seated himself in the chair beside the table, and then she went out of the room; he could hear her steps on the stairs. She returned quickly and laid a bulky envelope on the table beside him.

"Here it is," she said.

As Calumet took up the envelope and tore it open she dropped into the other chair, took up her book, opened it, and settled herself to read.

Calumet watched her covertly for a moment, and then gave his attention to the contents of the envelope.

There were a number of sheets of paper on which Calumet recognized his father's handwriting.

"MY SON:--Feeling that I am about to die, it is my desire to do what I can toward setting things right between us. Betty Clayton will tell you that I have repented of my treatment of you, but she cannot tell you how deep is the realization of the injury I have done you through my inhuman att.i.tude toward you. I fear that I have ruined your character and that it may be too late to save you from those pa.s.sions which, if not checked, will spoil your life.

"I know that children sometimes inherit the evil that has abided with their parents, and I am certain that you have inherited mine, because while you stayed at home I saw many evidences of it, aye, I used to delight in its manifestation. Toward the end of your stay at home I grew to hate you. But it was because of that woman. If ever there was an evil spirit in the guise of a human being, it was she. She--well, you will learn more of her later.

"I am going to try at this late day to repair the damage I did you. I have come to the conclusion that the surest way to do this is to force you to give me in death that respect and veneration which you refused me while I lived. You see that, in spite of my boasted repentance, I still have left a spark of satanic irony, and I do not expect you to believe me when I tell you that I have planned this for your own good.

But it seems to me that if you can exhibit respect for the one who is directly responsible for your cursed pa.s.sions you will be able to govern them on all occasions. That is my conviction, and if you do not agree with me there is no hope for you.

"Betty Clayton will tell you the conditions, and she will be your judge. I believe in Betty, and if you do not see that she is a true-blue girl you are more of a fool than I think you are."

At this point Calumet glanced sidelong at Betty, but she seemed engrossed in her book, and he resumed reading.

"That is all I have to say on that subject. You will have to look to Betty for additions. By this time, if she has carried out my wishes, she has told you what you may expect. I have told her the story which I am going to tell you, and I am certain that when you have finished it you will see that I am not entirely to blame. You will see, too, what havoc Tom Taggart has wrought in my life; why he has tried many times to kill me. Calumet, beware of the Taggarts! For the last five years they have been a constant menace to me; I have been forced to be on my guard against them day and night. They have hounded me, induced my men to betray me. In five years I have not slept soundly because of them.

But I have foiled them. I am dying now, and that which they seek will be hidden until you fulfill the conditions which I impose on you. I know you are coming home--I can feel it--and I know that when you read what is to follow you will be eager to square my account with Tom Taggart.

"Before going any further, before you read my story, I want you to know that the cursed virago whom you saw buried in the cottonwood was not your real mother. Your mother died giving you birth, and her body lies in a quiet spot beside the Rio Pecos, at Twin Pine crossing, about ten miles north of the Texas border. G.o.d rest her."

Again Calumet glanced at Betty. She was reading, apparently unconscious of him, and without disturbing her Calumet laid down the finished page and took up another.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TOLTEC IDOL

"I was twenty-five when your mother died," this page began. "I had a little ranch in the Pecos valley near Twin Pine crossing, and I had just begun to taste prosperity. After your mother died things began to go wrong. It didn't take me long to conclude that she had been responsible for what success I had had, and that without her I couldn't hope to keep things together. I didn't try very hard; I'll admit that.

I just gradually let go all holds and began to slip--began to drift back into the sort of company I'd kept before I met your mother. They were not bad fellows, you understand--just the rakeh.e.l.ly, reckless sort that keep hanging on to the edge of things and making a living by their wits. I'd come West without any definite idea of what I wanted to do, and I fell in with these men naturally and easily, because they were of my type.

"I had three intimates among them--a tall, clean-limbed fellow with the bluest and steadiest eyes I ever saw in a man, who called himself 'Nebraska'; a rangy Texan named Quint Taylor, who maintained that manual labor was a curse and quoted the Scriptures to prove it; and Tom Taggart. Tom and I were thick. I liked him, and he'd done things for me that seemed to prove that he thought a lot of me. He didn't like it a little bit when I married your mother--her name was Mary Lannon, and I'd got acquainted with her while riding for a few months for her father, who owned a ranch near Eagle Pa.s.s, close to the Rio Grande.

She was white, boy, and so were her folks, and you can be proud of her.

And if she had lived you could be proud of me--she'd have kept on making me a man.

"Taggart didn't like the idea of me getting hooked up. He didn't want to break up the old a.s.sociations. He and the others hung around for a year, waiting for something to turn up, and when your mother died it wasn't long before I was back with them. I left you in care of Jane Connor--her husband, Dave, owned the Diamond Dot ranch, which adjoined mine.

"During the year the boys had been knocking around without me they'd fallen in with an Indian from Yucatan, from the tribe called the Toltecs. This Indian called himself Queza--he'd been exiled because he was too lazy to work. The boys got him drunk one night, and he blabbed everything he knew about his tribe--how rich it was; how they'd discovered a diamond mine, and that gold was so common that they used it to make household ornaments. His story got the boys excited and they pumped him dry. They found out where his tribe lived, how to get there, and all that.

"Queza told them that the diamonds wouldn't be hard to get, that there were altar idols and ornaments in a big cave which was hollowed out of the face of a rock cliff, and that there was a bridge over to it, and that the cave wasn't guarded because the tribe had a superst.i.tious fear of the priests who had charge of the idols and things, and that the people didn't care for gold and diamonds, anyway, because they were so common.

"The boys had got all this out of Queza about a month before I sold out and joined them, and they'd rustled some money somewhere, and had everything fixed up to go to Yucatan to bring home some of that gold and diamonds. They wanted me to go along. I was in that frame of mind in which I didn't care much about what happened to me, and they didn't have to argue long. We dropped down the Rio Grande to a little place on the Gulf coast near where Brownsville is now. We bought a little boat from a fisherman--she wasn't more than thirty feet long and didn't look like she could stand much weather; but Nebraska, who'd told us that he'd done a little sailing on the California coast when he was a lot younger than he was then, said she'd stand anything we was likely to get in the Gulf. So we stocked her with provisions and water to last a month or so, and Nebraska pointed her nose toward Yucatan.

"I didn't think then what a rank job it was that we were going to do, but it won't do me any harm in your eyes to say that after we'd got started and I began to realize what it all meant, I was ashamed. I felt like a sneak and a coward all through the deal, but I couldn't back out after I'd started, and so I went through with it.

"We run into a spell of bad weather and had to hug the coast mighty close, and it was two weeks before we pulled into Campeche Bay, on the northwest coast of Yucatan. We worked the boat about half a mile up a little creek four or five miles south of Campeche, and worked half a day hiding her, so that she'd be there when we got back. Then, taking what grub was left, we struck out for the interior. It won't be any use telling you about that journey--you couldn't imagine, and I couldn't begin to tell you, what a miserable, slow, tortuous affair it was. It gets hot in New Mexico, but we got a taste of h.e.l.l in that Yucatan jungle. That country wasn't built for a white man.

"So I'm not going to try to tell you about the trip. We were tough and eager, and we stuck it out, traveling mostly by night, setting our course by the stars, about which I knew something. But we were a week going a hundred miles, and we were beginning to get into that frame of mind where we were noticing one another's faults and getting not a bit backward in talking about them, when one night at dusk we got a glimpse of the place we were looking for.

"Queza had called the place a town, and maybe that name fits it as well as another. It made me dizzy to look at it. We'd been climbing the slope of a mountain all afternoon--traveling in the daytime now, because we were getting near the end of our journey--Nebraska in the lead, the rest trailing him. We saw Nebraska stop and duck back into some brush. Then we all sneaked up to him and got our first look at the town.